Children and the Law Research Group Membership
Enquiries about the CLRG should be directed to the Co-Directors.
Co-Directors
| Who | Research |
|---|---|
| Dr Hannah Hirst | Hannah is currently working on three research projects:
|
| Dr Jonathan Collinson | Jonathan is currently completing a monograph entitled The Best Interests of the Child in Digital Data Protection: Theory and Practice in the Face of Indeterminacy (OUP). He is also undertaking research on the way that children feature in the work of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), funded by the SLSA. |
Members
| Professor Sara Fovargue | The Future of Human Reproduction - Wellcome funded (2022-2025) |
| Professor Kathryn Hollingsworth | Kathryn has been teaching and researching issues relating to family law, particularly relating to children, for over 20 years. |
| Dr Caterina Milo | Caterina is working on a project on the ethics and law of informed consent in the abortion context and a co-production project on the experience of loneliness in the birthing journey from an interdisciplinary standpoint. |
| Ms Penelope Russell | Analysis of wills 1600-1850 (2024-2025). |
| Professor Dawn Watkins | Dawn's current , funded by a €2 million grant from the ERC, aims to work with to improve children’s legal capability. |
| Dr Clare Fisher | I am in the very (very) early stages of planning a research network application looking at writing queer families. Whilst the primary focus would be creative writing, it would use an interdisciplinary approach, and would hope to include legal specialists, to explore how queer families understand themselves and are understood in contemporary Britain. So a part of this could be children in queer families and how legal definitions of family affect them. |
| Dr Silke Fricke | Health Professions, Nursing and Midwifery (Human Communication Sciences). I am researching speech, language, and literacy development and difficulties in monolingual and multilingual children as well as the interrelationships between these skills. My research also focusses on the evaluation of early support and intervention approaches for children’s speech, language and literacy development. |
| Prof Nathan Hughes | My research interests include a focus on the criminalisation of childhood health and developmental difficulties, including brain injury, 'neurodevelopmental disorders', trauma and adversity. This has included focus on inherent discrimination in our justice responses that fail to identify and respond to complex needs, and the international rights and protections that are therefore not being met. Through my research centre leadership, I am also interested in child protection processes and outcomes. |
| Dr Marie Hutton | Driven by her own experiences of familial imprisonment, Marie’s research has focused on prison ethnography to elicit the lived experience of family contact in prisons for prisoners and families and the human rights implications from a socio-legal and criminological perspective. Marie is the lead editor of the Handbook of Prison and the Family and has been commissioned by Northern Irish Prison Service, the Prison Reform Trust and HMP Lewes. |
| Dr Sabine Little | Multilingualism, identity and belonging, multilingualism as social justice, children's agency/participatory research |
I have two main research agendas, one on children in International Relations and another one on asylum and migration politics in Latin America. I develop studies on children (especially girls) involved in the Colombian armed conflict. I also reflect on the discourses surrounding migrant and refugee children in International Politics. My second research project considers the role of border agents (e.g. diplomats) in the control of family reunification of refugees in Brazil and Latin America. | |
Child language development | |
| My work analyses the relationship between government, law and civil society in Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It stands at the intersection of history, politics, sociology and law. I have especially sought to understand recent issues from historical comparative and transnational perspectives. These interests have led to investigations of the welfare state and ideas about risk; private law on the family and torts; and, the global diffusion of legal and social norms. I am currently completing a book titled Civilizing Marriage: Family, Nation and State in the German Empire and have a book on Human Rights, the Family and Internationalism since the Nineteenth Century coming out in spring 2025. I have published on the history of intermarriage, the global history of marriage law, and the relationship between current events related to family law and the past -- including European debates about refugees/migration and conflicts of law regarding polygamy and 'child marriage'. I am currently leading an AHRC project on the global history of socio-economic rights related to work that addresses questions of child labour globally over time. | |
| Lived experiences of children and access to play opportunities among marginalised and culturally diverse communities. | |
Dr Emma Blakey | How social inequalities impact on children and parents, specifically socioeconomic inequalities. |